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Terra Nova & Other TV Notes

Without Lost to occasionally pick on, I’ve stopped writing about TV. Because, really, what else can you say about most shows? Lately my take on TV has boiled down to a cavemannish “Me likey” or “Me no want watch!”

Me want watch dinosaurs!

I feel like if we could take Fringe and Terra Nova and mash them together like Play-Doh we’d end up with Lost. They are both children of that show, but children who only take after part of the parent. Fringe (the other show I’m tempted to write about…but we’ll see) has all the “oooooh!” mysteries that JJ Abrams likes and that made Lost intriguing. And unlike Lost they actually get around to answering most of them in a timely fashion!

Terra Nova, on the other hand, has that lush landscape that makes each hour feel like a vacation to someplace else. (Face it, Fringe. I’d rather watch action in verdant jungles than in dark and dank Boston warehouses.) It has mystery in the form of Avatar BadGuy’s missing son. It has actual monsters made of monster genes and bones and tissue that, face it, are a bit scarier than Smoke.

And,best of all, it has a Jack. Granted, I don’t think it will be another decade or so before television can cook up a character I loathe as much as I loathed Jack. A character whose every action is a mistake, whose every facial expression makes you want to bearmace him through the TV. But Terra Nova is providing me with a love-to-loathe fellow in the form of The Son. (Yes, eventually I will learn these people’s names. Maybe.) That guy was born to get me yelling at the TV.

I AM an episode behind the curve, though, so I’m not sure what happens in the hour aired last night. I do hope that we don’t have too much invested in the Sixer War. I’ve tuned in for Dinosaurs. Internicine battles over ore and territory are not why I’m watching and I hope they don’t keep on banging that drum.

As for other new shows, I think that it’s safe to say I’ve cancelled my Playboy Club Season Pass and am on the verge of throwing Pan Am in the dumper as well. Playboy Club is too much of The Eddie Cibrian hour. Pan Am is shaping up to be in turns both ridiculous (spies! fork stabbings!) and dull (Sis, I love you! Sis, I hate you! Let’s talk about our mommy issues over a pot of airplane coffee in the galley.)

Even bigger plot hole: you have shown your contempt for authority, your selfishness, and your contempt for the community, by deliberately having a third child in a world where overpopulation and scarcity of resources of all sorts are dire, immediate problems, and that makes you just the person we want to recruit to go back in time with us to a place where the surrounding dangers make concern for the community and the ability to follow reasonable orders rather important.

I’m ready to give it up after the first episode, but I guess if my husband wants to watch I won’t leave the room. We will have to catch up with anything after the first episode after the holidays and after our teams are eliminated from post-season contention, though.

See, I have a real problem with the SuperCop guy and that third kid. I know it’s “just a TV show” but does anyone else get creeped out when The Police (the actual police, not the band) are all “I’m a Police so the rules don’t apply to me! But I can use weapons to make sure they damn well apply to YOU!” ???

Yeah. I’m having a hard time picturing that guy as the hero I wanna root for.

@NM what sport is this? I’m really bad at sports.

@Sarcastro Yeah, I was a bit stymied by what good they think they’re accomplishing. But then the Lisa Simpson Sister had that bit of expository dialogue where she explained that they aren’t actually in “our” Time Stream but in the Time Stream of an alternate dimension (or some other gobbledygook). So basically everything they do in Dinopcop (Dinosaur prototype community of the past) has no effect at all on their smoggy present. Until, I suppose, the writers monkey with the rules for some drama down the line.

But, really, I’m STILL not clear on how what they are doing there in the past is helping the SmogFuture. Other than pulling a few icky bodies out of the equation.

Oh, the other thing I was sort of squicked by was when Avatar BadGuy was giving the leering look at his adopted-daughter type chick. I know they’ve made it clear that he and she are no blood relation. But he looked an awful lot like someone who wanted to make sweet music upon her jungle-hooch-brewing bod.

Baseball. My team and my husband’s team are in the midst of playing each other even as we type.

I think the theory is that if the dinopcop works, they will send everyone from the original time stream’s present over there. The folks there now are laying the groundwork for a larger community. Which, of course, is why you want to recruit the sort of people who are busy screwing things up in the present….

Have you ever read Ursula LeGuin’s story “Paradises Lost”? About a generation ship and how attempt to keep the middle generations focused on the long-term mission can get … complicated. I was reminded of it b/c Terra Nova does seem to have a bunch of folks there who aren’t focusing on any goals.

Terra Nova struck me as an Avatar spin-off. (Pandora) I’m half expecting Na’vi to drop in any episode now. It’s on par with Stargate:Universe, which means I’ll watch it if I have the time and I’m unmotivated toward any form of personal creativity.

Writers’ Advice

"Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window."
— William Faulkner